Introduction. The Iliad, c. 8th century BC, Homer - The Iliad in English. The Histories, 5th century BC, Herodotus - True lies. The Analects, 5th century BC, Confucius - Confucius goes global. The Republic, 4th century BC, Plato - Into the light. The Bible, 2nd century BC-2nd century AD - The King James Bible. Odes, 23-13 BC, Horace. Geographia, c. AD 100-170, Ptolemy - The almagest. Kama Sutra, 2nd or 3rd century AD, Mallanaga Vatsyayana - Eroticism in stone. The Qur'an, 7th century - Translating the Qur'an. Canon of Medicine, 1025, Avicenna - Fathers of medicine. The Canterbury Tales, 1380s-90s, Geoffrey Chaucer - Chaucer's 24 pilgrims' tales. The Prince, 1532, Niccolo Machiavelli - Banned books. Atlas, or, Cosmographic Meditations, 1585-95, Gerard Mercator - The Mercator projection. Don Quixote, 1605-15, Miguel de Cervantes - The legacy of Don Quixote. First Folio, 1623, William Shakespeare - Comedies, histories and tragedies. An Anatomical Study of the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals, 1628, William Harvey - the University of Padua. Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, 1632, Galileo Galilei - Galileo and the telescope. Principia mathematica, 1687, Isaac Newton. A Dictionary of the English Language, 1755, Samuel Johnson - Johnsonisms. The Sorrows of Young Werther, 1774, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe - Goethe and Ossian. The Wealth of Nations, 1776, Adam Smith - The Industrial Revolution. Common Sense, 1776, Thomas Paine - A tale of two revolutions. Lyrical Ballads, 1798, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Two modern Romantics. Pride and Prejudice, 1813, Jane Austen - Two literary traditions. A Christmas Carol, 1843, Charles Dickens - Rescuing Christmas. The Communist Manifesto, 1848, Karl Marx - A ten-point plan. Moby-Dick, 1851, Herman Melville - The Great American Novel. Uncle Tom's Cabin, 1852, Harriet Beecher Stowe - The slaves' own stories. Madame Bovary, 1857, Gustave Flaubert - Romanticism, Realism and Naturalism. On the Origin of Species, 1859, Charles Darwin. On Liberty, 1859, John Stuart Mill - Utilitarianism. War and Peace, 1869, Leo Tolstoy - Tolstoy the soldier. The Telephone Directory, 1878, New Haven District Telephone Company - The first telephone. The Thousand and One Nights, 1885, translated by Sir Richard Burton. A Study in Scarlet, 1888, Arthur Conan Doyle - Holmes' predecessors. The Interpretation of Dreams, 1899, Sigmund Freud - Freud and Surrealism. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, 1905 - Mein Kampf. Poems, 1920, Wilfred Owen - The Somme. Relativity: The Special and the General Theory, 1920, Albert Einstein - Einstein and the bomb. Ulysses, 1922, James Joyce - A Modernist poem. Lady Chatterley's Lover, 1928, D.H. Lawrence - Obscenity trials. The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, 1936, John Maynard Keynes - The Great Depression. If This is a Man, 1947, Primo Levi - Alexander Solzhenitsyn and The Gulag Archipelago. Nineteen Eighty-four, 1949, George Orwell - George Orwell meets Big Brother. The Second Sex, 1949, Simone de Beauvoir - Mary Wollstonecraft. The Catcher in the Rye, 1951, J.D. Salinger - The ducks in Central Park. Things Fall Apart, 1958, Chinua Achebe - The Dark Continent. Silent Spring, 1962, Rachel Carson - The environmental movement. Quotations from Chairman Mao, 1964, Mao Zedong - The cult of personality. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, 1997, J.K. Rowling - School fiction. Index. Picture Credits and Acknowledgements.